Tyler Cowen, a professor at George Mason University law school and one of the most popular econobloggers in America, was pepper sprayed in class yesterday by someone trying to make a "citizen's arrest."

Let's say your job is to make fun of David Brooks. Not your whole job, God forbid. Part of it, though. People expect you to make fun of David Brooks, and they ask you to do it, and you have been doing it for years, because the smugness and wrongness of David Brooks has seemed like an inexhaustible resource.

One thing that's essential in the ongoing discussion about how to regulate guns, everyone agrees, is to hear the voices of ordinary, law-abiding gun owners. So here's columnist Kathleen Parker in the Washington Post, explaining why proposed gun restrictions won't prevent gun crime:

The tenth anniversary of the Iraq War was marked by a procession of mostly liberal pundits solemnly apologizing for supporting the ill-fated invasion in the first place. As the issue of gay marriage goes in front of the Supreme Court, we're treated to the sight of the former president who signed the Defense of…

David Brooks, author, essayist, columnist for The New York Times, guy who has thoughts, is teaching a class at Yale this semester. Here is the syllabus; authors listed include Edmund Burke, Reinhold Niehbuhr, Isaiah Berlin, and David Brooks. "We will ask," Brooks writes, "whether it is proper to put a Yale window…

Richard Posner, judge, legal scholar, and the type of celebrity essayist that makes one question his fitness for the two preceding positions, has written a defense of the Electoral College in Slate. It qualifies as trolling, as done by a legal scholar. Let us take it point by point.

Peggy Noonan, whose uniquely airy style of kindergarten-reading-level prose works upon the political chattering classes (but no one else) like a snake charmer's flute works on a cobra, wrote one of the most vapid, scoff-worthy, fact-free columns of the pre-election news cycle, in which she predicted that Mitt Romney…

Peggy Noonan—White House veteran, Sunday morning talk show staple, author, Wall Street Journal political columnist, and intrepid explorer of America's darkest corners—is paid handsomely to offer her professional, expert political opinions, which many readers take very seriously.

Nate Silver, the famed statistician behind the FiveThirtyEight election forecast blog at the New York Times, is wrong. And gay. At least according to the more virulent elements of right-wing media. That he's wrong is only confirmed by his gayness, just as surely as his gayness is the source of his wrongness. Nate…

Politics, like sports, is a subject whose barrier to entry is nonexistent. That is to say, it takes virtually no knowledge of any sort in order to have an opinion on the topic. That is why politics, like sports, is such a popular thing to talk about. It is also why the vast majority of the political talk by…

Fabulously wealthy CEO whisperer and newspaper columnist Thomas Friedman is little more than a human-shaped random word generator programmed with the "Computers and Internet" section of a fourth-grade vocabulary textbook and fitted with a mustache. He writes one single column, sometimes using different proper nouns or…

Yesterday, former Gawkerer and current Salon writer Alex Pareene wrote a completely accurate and well-deserved knife-twisting takedown of Jonah Goldberg, the National Review's most youthful self-impressed hack. If you are unsure as to whether or not Jonah Goldberg is a hack, I encourage you to read Pareene's piece in…